


Ghosts

by chronicle23



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:15:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24832201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chronicle23/pseuds/chronicle23
Summary: It should have been over. But it wasn’t over. Not even close.Examining Jeff and Britta navigating six years of something that can't quite be defined. All seasons mentioned, with aproperalternate ending for S6.
Relationships: Britta Perry/Jeff Winger
Comments: 20
Kudos: 84





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Each segment of this story has a song that goes with it, if you're so inclined to listen! You definitely don't need to, as you won't miss anything. But I think it makes a pretty good background playlist for reading and the lyrics really helped me write each part! It's mostly indie and some of them are pretty angsty, but isn't that what we all love about these two?

**One**

_♪ A R I Z O N A: Let Me Know_

The thing was, he was going to go back in. He planned on it. He was just going to get some air, and then he was going to find her and they would figure it out. But then everything got messed up and then he ended up here, caught dead in the middle of the longest three months of his life. 

Jeff didn’t know what exactly Britta meant when she said what she said at that dance. He still had the image tattooed behind his eyes whenever he closed them, her standing up there in her dress and sash holding the microphone, waiting for him to say something back. He didn’t think that she _meant_ it like that, but however she meant it, at least she had the balls to say _something._

Because here he was, spending another long, sweltering July day thinking about if he should call her, letting time continue to slip away. He’d called Annie. He’d called Slater. Those were things he could do, because he knew exactly what to say; he knew how to still hold control. But he had no idea what to say to Britta and the fact that he was still thinking about her so much was starting to really freak him the fuck out. He was supposed to just take her out a couple times, sleep with her a handful of times until it got too messy or too mundane, and that would be it. None of the people he’d met in September were still supposed to be a part of his life.

But they were, in a big way. And Britta was right there at the center of them. It should have been over. But it wasn’t over. Not even close. Because he’d never met someone as interesting as her, someone as annoying as her, someone as infatuating as her. They’d only slept together that one time, and it barely counted for anything. But he couldn’t ignore the small fact that he hadn’t been able to hook up with anyone else this summer. He’d go out with Duncan, he’d smile at a nice girl and say all the right things to her, and they’d end up making out in his car, but then he’d drop her off and go home and think about Britta all over again.

He’d think about how dark her eyes looked with the all lights off and what it felt like to thread his hand through her hair. What her breath felt like against his mouth and how her hands felt like raking across his back. Those were the kinds of things he’d been wondering about all year. And now he knew. He wanted to talk to someone about it. But really, his only friends were the study group, and really, Britta was his closest friend in the group, so really, he wanted to talk to _her_ about it. And all he had to do was call her. But he didn’t. Because if she meant it, that was terrifying. But if she hadn’t meant it, that was also terrifying. So he just decided to file everything away in the back of his mind, pulling out memories every now and then like old newspaper articles.

* * *

**Two**

_♪ Coldplay: Princess of China_

If she didn’t know where they stood before, she definitely didn’t know now. She had planned on saying something. She was just going to drive around and clear her head and then she would call him and tell him no, she didn’t want to stop. But she didn’t. She let it slip away and he didn’t say anything, didn’t try to chase her this time. He flat-out ran in the other direction. And yeah, she could have been the one to say something, but then she realized she’d already tried that before, and in her experience, yelling after someone who was already running was a waste of breath.

Britta didn’t even know why she _cared_ this much. Jeff was the one who was supposedly obsessed with her, that’s how this whole thing had started. He was the one who brought them all together just so he could weasel his way into her pants. She tried to remember that. But then it got messy and confusing and turned into some kind of game and now, it was actually horrible, because that seemed to be a pattern in Britta’s life. And now here she was, staring down the barrel of another long and punishing summer.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, because it wasn’t even supposed to _be_ someone like him. He embodied everything she hated about society and culture and the male gender in general. He was a major douche. Most of the time. But now the problem was, she’d spent the better part of eight months actually spending time with him, and now she knew what he was like when he wasn’t trying to actively prove something in front of a group of people.

He was like this: he pretended to hate her cats, but sometimes, when he thought she wasn’t looking, she saw him scooch down on the floor so he could pet their bellies. He had things like an old baseball glove and a box of get-well cards stashed under his bed. Sometimes he reached over and played with her hair when he thought she was asleep. He called his mom every Sunday. And he loved tater tots. 

Those were the kinds of things that once you knew, you never forgot. Those kinds of things, those soft things, made it hard to hate a person, even when you really, really wanted to. And she knew other things, too. Like how it felt when she was pressed underneath the planes of his body or what it felt like when he kissed her neck in the morning and hadn’t shaved for a couple days. Or how he always seemed to taste like a scotch and a twinge sadness. 

So maybe she’d never really know why this happened, or how. One day she would probably even forget exactly how much it hurt and how much it sucked, because of how much it _didn’t_ suck while they were doing whatever they were doing. It was the non-suckiest almost-year of her life. She would never forget how they’d traded secrets like kids trading baseball cards. She would never stop wondering what might have happened if she knew more, if maybe things would have ended differently. Or maybe not ended at all. She would always want to know more. 

* * *

**Three**

_♪ The National: About Today_

There weren’t rules for this kind of thing. There was no playbook to consult. You were just supposed to figure it out. Figure out how to jump back to just friends from being in a relationship-but-not. Jeff wasn’t good at it; he wasn’t good at relationships. His thing with Britta certainly wasn’t the longest he’d been with someone, but it was definitely the most amount of time he’d ever spent with anyone. He knew all these behind-the-scenes things about her now (she had to sleep with a fan on, she loved crossword puzzles, if she found a spider she caught it and released it outside, she had a scar on her left ankle from climbing a barbed wire fence in high school) and they were impossible to forget when he glanced over to his right.

So he just kind of did what had always been so easy: he teased her, he argued with her, and generally annoyed her (maybe being mean was his love language?). Except, he may have overdone it and could feel himself being a complete ass, but he couldn’t stop. It was so much easier to call her the worst and foolishly try to convince himself that she was, instead of spending all his time wishing he was still spending all his time with her. 

The only problem was, Britta wasn’t stupid. He knew that she knew what he was doing. She gave him a lot of chances to stop doing it. She was still herself, still there for him, still his friend. Forcing him to confront his messes and talking him down from ego-trips at bat mitzvahs and even trying to drunk marry him right back. But he also knew she wasn’t going to sit around forever and wait for things to go back to whatever they used to be.

So he definitely knew it was coming. It was going to happen. He saw the way Troy looked at her and how she looked at him back. And he gritted his teeth every time it happened and spent an extra few seconds staring at whatever tweet or Bloomberg article he was pretending to read while Abed sent him telepathic distress signals. 

But it didn’t matter, because honestly, Britta was better off without him. She was too good for him, really. She was a little rough around the edges, but all the important parts still worked: honest, kind, and didn’t keep her friends at a ten foot distance. And maybe that was part of the reason why he’d never wanted to call her his... anything, because it would only be a matter of time before she realized it too, that she was better off. So he couldn’t. He couldn’t ask her to be anything to him.

But when he watched her trot off with Troy, to help him move his things into the second bedroom in that dingy apartment so they could spend the entire summer together while he spent it alone, he really wished he could.

* * *

**Four**

_♪ Blossoms: Stranger Still_

She did it because she wouldn’t know until she tried it. She didn’t want to call it an experiment, because that sounded cruel, but that’s basically what it was. Because she already knew somewhere deep down, but she had to prove it to herself first, had to have some concrete evidence before she could fully accept it. So that’s how Britta ended up smushed into Troy’s life, hanging out with him at an apartment filled with people nearly a decade younger than her. It was to try to disprove an unshakable truth: she wasn’t over Jeff Winger. 

The whole thing was so dumb though; it was so high school. Britta had already been through it in high school, it shouldn’t have been happening again, fifteen years later. She couldn’t exactly pinpoint when it had all started spiraling out of control. It wasn’t when he started being mean to her and Troy started being nice to her. That part was pretty straightforward. It was after that. After Troy was calling her babe and buying her cute things and holding her hand, stuff Jeff had never done and she’d never asked him to, but now she couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like if he did.

It started getting out of control when she skipped Thanksgiving with Troy, which should have been their first holiday together, to hang out in a manicured condo while Jeff and Winger Sr. sorted through the wreckage of their relationship. It got worse when she listened to Jeff finally lay his secrets bare and acknowledge the extent of his fucked-up ness. It got really bad and really unavoidable when he looked over at her in the car and time slowed to a standstill and she thought she might drown with two lungs full of air. 

She had all these answers now. You could do so much with answers; you could start building something. She could fold up answers like origami into beautiful paper swans and hold them in her hands. But then, it all came grinding to a halt. Because now he was leaving, and neither of them had said a damn word about what that really meant. He was going to be a lawyer again. And they would all miss him but they would all be there for him. But that was everybody else. For the two of them, it seemed so dissatisfying to her, so sad, that it would just end so unresolved, like an unfinished novel abandoned in a desk drawer.

She’d always known he was going to leave Greendale eventually, but she didn’t think it would be so anticlimactic (and a really small part of her didn’t think it would be without her). Jeff was leaving and that was that. He was nervous. He was having second doubts. He wasn’t as much of a douche anymore. But he still wasn’t chasing her. He was still doing the opposite, actually. He was still walking away. Maybe not running this time, but still moving in the other direction.

And she wasn’t going to say something stupid again that would make her have to figure out how to get him to come back again. It was better just to let him go, let him live whatever kind of perfect life he thought was waiting for him on the other side. So she laughed with him, ate cake with him, her dress matching his tie, and pretended that everything was ending the way she wanted it to, pretended that she wouldn’t miss him when his seat was empty in the fall, hoping that he’d find her if it all came crashing down.

* * *

**Five**

_♪ Lord Huron: Love Like Ghosts_

It was an inconvenient but simple truth. The truth was, she would have married him. For sure. Because she was thirty-three and still at community college and really didn’t have much of a plan going on, but Jeff was a plan she could get behind. That was a plan that kind of made sense, in a weird way. A plan with a tangible beginning and end. It wasn’t as if she was head over heels in love with him or anything, but if it was going to be someone, it might as well be Jeff.

Why? Well, because he knew everything about her. Just about everything. Most of the important stuff. And he had stuck around. And she knew mostly everything about him, most of the important stuff. And she was still sticking around. They’d already put in five years of that kind of hard work, fleshing out all the difficult stuff. Why start that whole process over with someone else?

Plus, if she was with him, actually with him, she could look after him in the way she really wanted to but it felt weird to do if there wasn’t something established between them. 

Then there were all the other little things. The little stuff she tried to forget about because she knew it was actually big stuff and that scared her. The stuff like: Jeff looking at her in a way that made her insides feel like mashed potatoes, Jeff kissing her in a way that made her feel like she was in a damn Nicholas Sparks novel, Jeff remembering stupid, tiny little things about her that she didn’t even remember telling him.

And there was more, like the promise of a lifetime of the kind of laughter that left you gasping for air and a lifetime of the kind of sex that made the downstairs neighbors bang a broom against the ceiling, but those other things were always the background soundtrack. He was still overbearing, still stubborn, still pretentious, still argumentative, still a pain in the ass. But he was her pain in the ass, really. And he’d probably only make her want to rip her hair out fifty percent of the time. So it wasn’t hard to see it, to see the rough outline of a plan: them repeating their old tried-and-true pattern for five years, for ten, for twenty-five. 

So maybe she’d shrugged and laughed it off and danced obnoxiously when they called it off, when her semblance of a plan slipped through her fingers like butter. Because sure, yeah, she didn’t care. Marry me, don’t marry me, no skin off my back. And maybe she stared after him for a second too long when he went to talk to Abed, and maybe the tiniest hint of a frown betrayed her when she saw Annie smirk in her direction, and maybe she went home and cried, just a little, because she didn’t think she’d ever be stupid enough to let her guard down enough to let herself get hurt like the last time. But those are all maybes. 

* * *

**Six**

_♪ Foster The People: Lamb’s Wool_

Déjà vu was a weird thing. No matter how many times you’d been in a life-changing moment, it never got easier to navigate. So here Jeff was again, six years later, Britta’s eyes burning through him like sapphire, waiting for him to say something. But he didn’t know what to say. Again. 

They’d been talking, long after everybody else had left their table of misfits at the Vatican. She told him she felt like she was going in circles. He told her about saying goodbye to Annie and Abed. Once he told her, it did feel like that. A goodbye. Finished. Chapter complete. The end. She’d watched him through wise, narrowed eyes the whole time he’d talked, like one of her cats. Then she got up to leave and he followed her outside, trapping her between his arm and the brick wall.

And now he was here, stuck in a moment again. Being so close to her was intoxicating; he felt like he was in high school all over again. Seventeen, heart at his knees, about to ask the prettiest girl in school to the dance. Because, _damn_. Britta _was_ the prettiest girl in school, all these years later, he thought, as his eyes roamed every inch of her face. He remembered the first time he saw her. He remembered asking her out for the better part of a year. He remembered becoming friends with her, best friends. He remembered the first time, the last time, all those times in between. 

And then he stopped remembering, and kissed her. And she kissed him back and every time they ended up here he wondered why he hadn’t done something a long time ago so he could do it more often. Because it was the kind of kiss that never got old: warm, anchoring, electric. The reason he’d pretty much lost interest in anybody else, pretty much saw himself only wanting this one thing, for a long, long time. 

“Hey,” he told her, pulling away. 

“What?” she asked, hands still gripping the collar of his jacket.

He felt like he might pass out, but he suddenly had a secret that he desperately needed to set free, right now at this very moment, or it was going to eat him alive from the inside out. 

“A long time ago, you asked me a question, and I never answered it, but I think I probably should,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said softly, bemused. “What was the question?” she asked.

The hideous fluorescent lights from the parking lot lit up her face, but it didn't matter, since he would have been to pick her out in complete darkness. The lights were shining obscenely, so he imagined them as stadium lights, an imaginary audience cheering him on before he made the big play. He swallowed once, wondering if this was how she had felt. 

“It’s yes. You asked me if I love you and if you hadn’t figured it out somewhere along the way, the answer is yes.”

An artful smile flashed across Britta’s face, as if she had already been acquainted with this knowledge for some time.

“Duh-doy,” she told him, as she threaded her fingers through his and tugged him toward his car. But she didn't have to tug him very much, because he was definitely ready to go home. 


End file.
